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Latour - On Some of The Affects of Capitalism PDF
Latour - On Some of The Affects of Capitalism PDF
Bruno Latour
Lecture given at the Royal Academy, Copenhagen,
26th of February, 2014*
For discussion only
“If the world were a bank, they would have already bailed it out”. Such is
the slogan painted by Greenpeace militants in one of their recent campaigns.
It says a lot about our level of intellectual corruption that we don’t find such
a line simply funny but tragically realistic. It has the same bleak degree of
realism as Frederick Jameson’s famous quip that: “Nowadays it seems easier
to imagine the end of the world than to imagine the end of capitalism!”.
If you call the world, I mean the world we all live in, “first nature” and
capitalism our “second nature” — in the sense of that to which we are fully
habituated and which has been totally naturalized — then what those
sentences are saying is that the second nature is more solid, less transitory,
less perishable than the first. No wonder: the transcendent world of beyond
has always been more durable than the poor world of below. But what is new
is that this world of beyond is not that of salvation and eternity, but that of
economic matters. As Karl Marx would have said, the realm of
transcendence has been fully appropriated by banks! Through an
unexpected turn of phrase, the world of economy, far from representing a
sturdy down to earth materialism, a sound appetite for worldly goods and
solid matters of fact, is now final and absolute. How mistaken we were;
apparently it is the laws of capitalism that Jesus had in mind when he
warned his disciples: “Heaven and earth will pass away, but my words will
never pass away.” (Matt 24-35).
This inversion of what is transitory and what is eternal is no longer a
joke, especially since what should be called the “Australian strategy of
voluntary sleepwalking toward catastrophe” is being implemented to the
full after the last election: not content to dismantle the institutions,
scientific establishments and instruments that could prepare his
constituency to meet the new global threat of climate mutations,1 the prime
minister, Tony Abbott, is also dismantling, one after the other, most
departments of social science and humanities.2 Such a strategy makes a lot of
sense: not thinking ahead is probably, when you are an Australian and given
what is coming, the most rational thing to do. “Not thinking” seems to be the
slogan of the day when you consider that in the United States alone
something like a billion dollars,3 yes, one billion, is being spent to generate
ignorance about the anthropic origin of climate mutations. In earlier
periods, scientists and intellectuals lamented the little money spent on
learning, but they never had to witness floods of money spent on unlearning
what was already known. While in times past thinking critically was
associated with looking ahead and extracting oneself from an older
obscurantist past, today money is being spent to become even more
obscurantist than yesterday! “Agnotology”, Robert Proctor’s science of
generating ignorance, has become the most important discipline of the day.4
It is thanks to this great new science that so many people are able to say in
their heart “Perish the world, provided my bank survives!”. It is a desperate
task to continue thinking when the powers of intelligence are dedicated to
shutting down thought and to marching ahead with eyes wide closed.
1
http://www.desmogblog.com/2013/10/09/australia-s-new-prime-minister-
surrounded-climate-science-denying-voices-and-advisors
2
http://www.australianhumanitiesreview.org/archive/Issue-November-
2012/bode&dale.html
3
http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2013/dec/20/conservative-groups-
1bn-against-climate-change
4
Robert Proctor, and Londa Schiebinger. Agnotology: The Making and Unmaking of
Ignorance. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2008.
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what I consider science’s and politics’ main effects, these being the opening
of new possibilities and the provision of margins to maneuver. Why is it that
when we are asked or summoned to combat capitalism, we feel, I feel so
helpless? Faced with such a question, I will start with this idea—that one of
the affects of capitalism, that is, of thinking in terms of capitalism, is to generate
for most of people who don’t benefit from its wealth a feeling of helplessness
and for a few people who benefits from it an immense enthusiasm together
with a dumbness of the senses. So when we use capitalism to interpret what
is going on, we obtain, on the one hand, binding necessities from which there
is no escape and a feeling of revolt against them that often results in
helplessness; on the other, boundless possibilities coupled with a total indifference
for their long-term consequences.
This odd mixture of fate and hubris is certainly not the way in which
first nature was initially encountered: neither helplessness nor unbound
enthusiasm and indifference to consequences would have allowed humans
to inhabit the earth for very long. Rather a solid pragmatism, a limited
confidence in human cunning, a sane respect for the powers of nature, a
great care invested to protect the fragility of human enterprise—these
appear to be the virtues for dealing with first nature. Care and caution: a
totally mundane grasp of the dangers and of the possibilities of this world of
below. A reading of Tim Ingold or of Marshall Sahlins of or any
anthropologist of “stone-age economics” will convince you of this point.
It is often said that the reason why second nature is so solid and
transcendent it is because it’s being governed by “laws of economics” just as
eternal and just as solid as “laws of physics”. I heard this old saw repeated
only a few days ago on the French radio.5 But today it seems more difficult to
pile the laws of second nature on top of those of the first. Apparently climate
scientists are using the laws of physics to register what happens to first
nature while climate deniers are pitting the laws of economics governing
second nature against the laws governing the Earth. In one set of laws, CO2
plays no role at all while in the other set, it is one of the main culprits. What a
fight! Should we be prepared to say that we know with much greater
precision what second nature is than how first nature is being run? Should
we say that economists have discovered a kind of certainty, of
indisputability, that is superior to the laws of physics? That their CO2 is more
5
In a recent radio comment in France Culture morning edition (February 13th,
between 8h20am and 8h35), editorialist Brice Couturier said that "it is an illusion
to think that politics can beat the laws of economics", and that these laws are "like
the laws of physics".
136 - The Affects of Capitalism 4
real than the climatologists’ CO2? Then Greenpeace would be right: “if the
world were a bank, they would have already bailed it out”.
That this is not the case will be obvious to any practicing scientist, be
they biologist, chemist or physicist — and indeed to any practicing
economist. Testing, calculating, combining the laws of nature (I mean first
nature) does not generate a feeling of helplessness nor of being faced with
indisputable necessities. Quite the contrary. In the laboratory the slogan of
the scientists isn’t quite Obama’s “Yes we can!” but is at least, “Yes we could”.
And discussion among peers proliferates at once. The closer you are to
science, the more possibilities open up; the more intimate your contact with
first nature, the more surprises you get, the more unexpected agencies
spring up, the more margins for maneuver you obtain. Is this not the
experience we all have when reading and writing scientific literature? In
science, when necessity comes in, it is possibilities that are multiplied.
Why is it the case that when you shift to second nature and its
necessities come in, possibilities vanish and a deep feeling of helplessness
sets in? Why is the subtext of any allusion to capitalism the sad sentence:
“Sorry, there is no other way”? This being said even though economists
themselves are angrily disputing with one another so that it is not their
unanimous agreement that produces a feeling of helplessness when we are
confronted with the laws of second nature (remember President Truman’s
quip “Please, send me a one-armed economist!” because he was tired of
hearing his counselors say: “On the one hand, this” and “On the other hand,
that”). Although economists are of course affected by capitalism, they are not
the only reason why the results of their research always appear, in the end, as
the figure of fate.
Why is fate, the old fatum from which no human can escape, always
raised in connection with modernization — modernization that defines
itself, or at least that used to define itself, as anti-fate par excellence? There
must be something so poisonous in the idea of capitalism that it has such an
effect on thought as to render any alternative unthinkable.
The history of such a poison has been written often. In itself the
distribution of unbound possibilities for some, coupled with binding
necessities for the many, is as old as commerce. Long ago, Fernand Braudel
showed that any marketplace offers occasions (multiplied by the use of
financial tools) for some enterprising go-between to treat friends and family
as utter strangers and faraway strangers as close buddies. Capitalism, in that
sense, feeds on, parasitizes and distorts marketplaces. Markets and
136 - The Affects of Capitalism 5
6
David Graeber. Debt: The First 5,000 Years. Melville House, 2011.
136 - The Affects of Capitalism 6
point here being that it was impossible and immoral to try limiting the
miseries of the workers or saving the losers. Social Darwinism has since
become our second nature.
What is really remarkable is that during the last two centuries the very
notions of the two natures have exchanged their properties: first nature has
entered the Anthropocene where it is hard to distinguish human action from
natural forces and which is now full of tipping points, peaks, storms and
catastrophes, while only second nature, it seems, has kept the older features
of an indifferent, timeless and fully automatic nature governed by a few
fundamental and undisputable laws totally foreign to politics and human
action! And this nature has now become totally different from the old idea of
social Darwinism. What does it mean to obey the “laws of the jungle” if it is
Gaia that now threatens to take its revenge (as James Lovelock claims) and
to get rid of capitalism entirely — and of the human race in addition! It seems
that people are less keen on talking of the benefits of the “laws of the jungle”.
As Timothy Mitchell has recently argued in Carbon Democracy, just at the
time the limits of first nature became apparent, that is around 1945, “The
Economy” was invented once and for all—an infinite and boundless domain
totally indifferent to terrestrial existence and the very notion of limits, and
entirely self-centered and self-governed. Whereas before the war there still
existed, in what was still called “political economy”, the idea of scarcity and
allocation of rare goods, The Economy began to be entirely unmoored from
any limitation. Dominique Pestre has shown that this process of unmooring,
of infinitization, occurred once again in the 1970s, when the first report of
the Club of Rome tried to bring first nature to bear on second nature.7 In a
matter of a few years, limits had vanished and any connection between first
and second nature had disappeared.
7
Pestre Knowledge and Rational Action The Economization of Environment, and
After. ‘’A possible explanation might be the move from the defense of the
environment to an economics of environment; from environment per se to a
theology of perfect markets; from a recognition of the necessity of choice to
miraculous ‘instruments’ able to combine the impossible. The (understandable)
privilege given to economic growth, coupled with the power of money in a
deregulated world (despite the declaration of interest made by business in
ecological modernization and sustainable development) allowed the digestion of
most warnings, the quiet rewriting of most decisions. But strong belief in theory,
notably mainstream economics, played its role in reassuring everybody that
rational solutions were put into operation and that the planet would be saved.”
136 - The Affects of Capitalism 7
what pits ecology against The Economy: they are not dealing at all with the
same nature. Which one will win over the other will determine our future.
attacks the soul and has created this deserted political landscape we live in
when those who call themselves the Left and even the radical Left are
simultaneously sure of failing and sure of being right — yes being right in the
sense of conniving happily with the Right in letting capitalism be even more
systematic than it is. Like science, politics opens possibilities. It cannot be
associated with failure and helplessness. If you have failed, it’s not
capitalism you should revolutionize but rather your ways of thinking. If you
keep failing and don’t change it does not mean you are facing an invincible
monster, it means you like, you enjoy, you love, to be defeated by a monster.
This is a case of psycho- or better, as Eric Voegelin would say, of
pneumopathology, a form of spiritual masochism, not of courage.8 Yet the
moral upper ground is still occupied by people who give lessons to the others
from no other authority than having dismally failed to change anything.
We begin to see how difficult it is to disentangle the contradictory
affects created by an appeal to the concept of capitalism: it generates a
prodigious enthusiam for seizing unbounded opportunities; a dystopian
feeling of total helplessness for those who are submitted to its decrees; a
complete disinhibition as to the long-term consequences of its action for
those who profit from it; a perverse wound of smug superiority in those who
have failed to fight its progression; a fascination for its iron laws in the eyes
of those who claim to study its development, to the point that it appears to
run more smoothly than nature itself; a total indifference to how the soil on
which it is rooted is occupied; a complete confusion about who should be
treated as a total stranger and who as a close neighbor. And above all, it marks
a movement towards modernization that delegitimates those who stay
behind as so many losers. Actually now that capitalism is thought to have no
enemy, it has become a mere synonym for the implacable thrust forward of
modernization. From this tangle of effects, I get no other feeling than an
increase sense of helplessness. The mere invocation of capitalism renders me
speechless… It might be best to abandon the concept entirely.
You remember Hamlet’s expression in Marx’s 18th Brumaire: “Well
done, old mole!” What sort of mole would dig down enough to subvert in the
end not capitalism but some of the affects generated by this odd way to read
history and to give an expression to our passions and indignations? Is there
8
Eric Voegelin. "The New Science of Politics, and Science." Modernity without Restraint. The Collected
Works of Eric Voegelin. Volume 5: The Political Religions, The New Science of Politics, and Science,
Poltiics and Gnosticism (edited by Manfred Henningsen). Ed. Henningsen, Manfred. Columbia and
London: The University of Missouri Press, [1952] 2000.
136 - The Affects of Capitalism 10
an alternative? It appears that the solution will not come from dialectics
with capitalists “digging their own grave” but from the first nature. It is
ironic to think that so much saliva has been spent to save higher values from
the risk of commodification when the question should rather have been to
bring this whole enterprise down to earth. But which Earth? How to resist the
transcendence of capitalism parading as immanence?
I hope you will have forgiven the emphatic tone with which I have delivered
those 11 theses. I simply wanted to emphasize the new twist recent history
has put on Valery’s famous sentence: “We civilizations now know ourselves
mortal”: “We nature, or rather Gaia, now know ourselves mortal”. There is
something deeply unsettling in Jameson’s quip. But now that historicity has
moved to first nature, there is a chance, probably a very small one, to be a
civilization again, that is, a state of affairs that cultivates its own finitude.
The other solution, unfortunately the most probable, is that capitalism in its
136 - The Affects of Capitalism 13
9
[1] Clive Hamilton. Earthmasters. The Dawn of the Age of Climate Engineering.
New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013.